It Takes a Thief

by Niels Hammer

  “I did not notice anything amiss.”

  She was saying it as much to him as to herself.

  “I did not leave any footprints in the rose-bed beneath the window, and I took off my shoes. But when tip-toeing upstairs I suddenly stopped moving as I, in my mad jubilant joy of having found you at last, had forgotten that there might be someone else in the house though when I lay on the window sill to listen I had not heard anything but the beating of my own heart. Still frightened I left the way I had come in but took care to place the window at the height at which I had found it. Then I lifted the grass up where I had been lying to give you the impression that the flattened grass had been caused by a Red Deer, and I even took some Deer droppings and placed them at the edge of the grove where they were very conspicuous.”

  “When I found the transmitter on the car I knew I was under surveillance, so I did not go up to the little grove behind the house to investigate further.”

  “Later, when I thought you would be asleep, I parked at the little track further down the road and placed the transmitter under the wing of the wheel. It was not the best place, I admit.”

  “As I said, I found it when I searched for it. If you had not broken into my house – ”

  “I did actually not break into your house as you had left the window open.”

  Looking at him she laughed.

  “It makes a legal difference but not an actual one, and I think you’ll have to agree?”

  “Of course, but then I was at a loss about what to do next. I wanted to surprise you in the same way as you had surprised me, but instead of intending to take something, I wanted to give you something, and of course the roses and the Champagne were simply tokens of how I felt. I hoped you would be able to see that as well as the poetic justice of my approach. So I waited two days beside the road to Yarmouth, and when you finally came I followed you till you parked at the fish market. I drove back quickly and parked further down the road and crept in through the back window with the roses and the Champagne. As a precaution I left the French doors in your sitting room ajar before I sat down in the sofa to wait, and when the receiver beeped I knew you would come in a couple of minutes and opened the Champagne.”

  “But I had really never seen you before; only in profile through the curtains in the hall, and when you shone that light in my face I could not see you though you could see me clearly. So you gave me a shock just standing there with an idiotic smile, a glass and a huge bouquet of roses in your hand. If you had been a thief I would have felt assured, but I did not know what I should do. It was too uncanny. I felt frightened and I thought that the best defence was an attack, just like you did when you saw me coming with the red light towards your bed.”

  “But you wore a mask and I could not see your face. There was hardly any light.”

  “The shock you gave me had a strong negative effect and it deprived you instantly of all the well-meaning or romantic intentions the roses and the Champagne signified, for it made me react instinctively by relying on self-defence. I knew I had to find the real reason for your presence right way, but you seemed to me to be so glib that I did not imagine that you would give it to me voluntarily or that I could trust you if you did, so I thought I had no alternative but to catch hold of you immediately, and just when I felt certain of being able to get a truthful explanation you slipped out of my grip, like a fox, and ran away.”

  The image she had seen of herself and of him in her mind’s eye made her smile – but it also enabled her to forgive herself for having made such a mistake.

  “Just like you slipped out of mine when you jumped out of the window?”

  The reciprocity of the situations made her shrug her shoulders with relief. They were even.

  “I should have taken some ice and tended to your wound, driven you to the hospital, kept vigil while you slept and driven you back, instead of just taking to my heels as quickly as I could.”

  “Yes, maybe you should.”

  The rather injured cadence of her voice was sweetened by the irony of her smile. In a nutshell.

  “But you looked as if you were ready to kill me.”

  “So you were afraid?”

  At a rational level – clinical and investigative –

  “Of course I was afraid! I could not get out of your grip and you should be mindful of the strength you have when you’re furious. I felt I had to save myself and you too for that matter.”

  “So you thought I was going to kill you in the same way as I killed him?”

  Resentment and regret – fused by a certain scepsis.

  “I did not think that you wanted to kill me; but I was afraid of your strength of and my own helplessness; however, I had not at that time thought about George Salisbury. It was only afterwards, for when driving back, hardly able to use my right arm, I felt more miserable than all miseries made. I felt dejected, black and barren, and yet I had an inkling that there might be a clue somewhere, but I could not pinpoint it. So I sat down to breathe slowly and concentrate on my inner awareness but fell asleep for sleep had become a sedative that alleviated the pain a little, both the pain in my shoulder and to a far greater extent, the mental pain of having failed and failed completely. When I woke I knew that I had to occupy myself with something that was not mentally demanding in order to let my subconscious search for the missing link on its own, and using only my left hand I began weeding the beds with Leeks and Carrots. After an hour of single-minded attention I found what I had been looking for. At a dinner party the evening after our encounter I had heard a stray remark about an insurance broker called George Salisbury whose house had been burglarised, and whose body had been found further down the river two month later with a dislocated shoulder. George Salisbury’s house is less than half a mile away from here as the Crow flies. His house is sequestered just like mine, especially vis-à-vis neighbours. He and his wife, Suzy, used it at irregular intervals; I am often abroad. Both houses suggest a relatively comparable degree of affluence though in my case this is a deception. These considerations pointed to a specific pattern of preference. But it was only because of my sore shoulder that I felt that his dislocated shoulder could be explained in the same way and that it consequently had to be you who broke into his house on the night of the sixteenth of February.”

  “So that was the real reason.”

  “Yes, if you had not used the same strategy I would not have thought about it. So when I had told Mary, the woman who had made that stray remark about her friend Suzy and the burglary, about what I wanted, she asked Suzy to send us photographs of her lost jewellery, and to instruct her lawyer to give us a copy of the autopsy. Suzy was delighted by the prospect of getting her old jewellery back and within half an hour we had both the autopsy and the photographs. I sent the file with the photographs to Fjodor, and he arranged to let an acquaintance of his engage a couple of people, armed with the photographs, to ask in the most likely places for the jewellery – ”

  “There you were very lucky indeed – ”

  “Yes, I think so too, for although the evidence from the autopsy, which stated that George had a dislocated shoulder, if correlated with what I had experienced, seemed to be conclusive to me, it could at best only be regarded as circumstantial evidence. So being very anxious about how you would react and fearing that you might disappear any minute, I did not know whether I should pay you a visit straightaway bolstered only with the circumstantial evidence or whether I should take the chance and wait to see if I could get proof in form of the jewellery; but I feared that I would not be able to persuade you to listen to me without some solid proof; and as soon as I had the wristlet, which I got early this morning in London, I came.”

  “So you have done nothing for almost three weeks but trying to find me?”

  “No, apart from sailing a little, listening to warblers and looking for Otters.”

  “What do you do f
or a living if I may ask?”

  “Did I not tell you? I’m a painter.”

  “No! I noticed a smell of terpentine when I came in that night but did not investigate it further; but do you make so much money that you can drink Champagne every day and spend as much money as you want chasing women up and down the country?”

  Her gaze was clear and objective. She was placing him on the seasoned scale of her experience.

  “No, not by the paintings I paint, I regret to say, but by the paintings I pretend to paint.”

  She looked at him to get a proper explanation and he felt naked but that was a prerequisite.

  “Say, what do you mean?”

  “I paint most of my paintings to suit myself. I am not paid very much for these paintings and I only sell them to people who can appreciate them, but then I paint some paintings according to the prevailing trends, though also according to certain genres or to certain individual styles.”

  She smiled and her smile was small and mean – the smile of the society in which they lived.

  “Do you forge paintings then?”

  The silver – not the green – side of the trembling leaf.

  “No, I do not sign them, and when they are sold, they are sold as investment objects. The people who buy them know that they could be imitations, or rather variations over a given theme, but their greed makes them hope that they are genuine as that would multiply their investment. On the other hand they are not explicitly discouraged in this belief. A painting is not an investment, and if people who regard them as investments, eventually happen to be disappointed, they have only their greed and their own lack of discrimination to blame. A painting ought only to be bought on account of love, of passion, of joy. I feel disgusted by people who use art as an investment. Art is sacred. Art has soul. Art should not be mistaken for money. People who do that defile themselves as well as all that is sacred.”

  “So you’re a criminal, just like I am. I see, it takes a thief to – ”

  “Nonsense! I’m certainly not a criminal in any sense of the word, including its connotations. I do not pretend or suggest that the paintings are genuine. I leave that question to the buyers, to the greed of the buyers.”

  “But you play on their credulity.”

  “Partly, but much more on their greed, on their money lust. And why do you think I should assume that you were a criminal?”

  “Stealing is generally regarded as being a criminal activity, you know.”

  The sarcasm in the tone of her voice or the conventionality of her perspective made him angry.

  “Criminals follow the law as they have no ethics of their own, and this applies both to those who flaunt it and to those who defend it. Honest individuals have discovered the foundation of ethics in themselves. Those who follow the law use it as the lowest common denominator. The entire legal system exists basically as a method for ‘lawful’ exploitation of people and resources. It’s disappointing to hear that you have not given these elementary questions the consideration they deserve. What people believe has not much to do with reality, for reality is as it is regardless of beliefs and fixed ideas. Society is based on prostitution. Whoever does something for gain and not for the act in itself violates nature and his or her own dharmaḥ. So when I paint one of my own paintings I am true to myself, when I paint one of the other paintings I betray myself, but society is constructed on universal betrayal of one’s soul. If people can accumulate money they live off the work of others, they steal, they betray themselves and they steal from Nature. When you steal from them, and there would be no point in stealing from the poor, you steal from the real thieves. There is a poetic justice in this, so while it may make you a criminal in the eyes of the generall, it makes you a saint in the eyes of God.”

  “And in your eyes too?”

  She doubted both him and herself but her true nature had been touched to vibrate. Sattvam.

  “There are no other eyes with which to see reality; only the eyes of a child, the eyes of a Tiger, the eyes of ecstasy, the eyes of authentic art. True eyes see naked souls.”

  “And I thought I was quite unconventional, but at least I never doubted what I did.”

  “You are unconventional, and you’ve got courage, guts and independence of mind.”

  The seriousness of humour. Cojones or the equivalent – ovarios or maybe just dopamine susceptibility. A sceptical but sweet smile shaped the curves of her lips.

  “And that’s what you like?”

  “Naturally; it indicates self-reliance. And now it’s your turn, what made you decide to break into my house?”

  She took a deep breath before she plunged down into the depth of the story of her past as a word said never could be hauled back in over the fence of the teeth – but disarmed by his honesty she would find it tempting to be as frank with him as he had been with her.

  “First and foremost, I almost only approach houses in which the inhabitants are away; and secondly, I prefer houses with a single resident, for I am prepared to deal with one surprise, but not with two. Your house seemed to be reasonably well kept. An ill-kept house may indicate a rich eccentric individual, but in most cases it is ill-kept for lack of funds. Furthermore, the access was easy and there were good get-away possibilities. And then, no come here.”

  She rose and he followed her but refrained from asking what it was she was going to show him for the oceanic rhythm of her steps revealed the answer to all of his questions – and when she had opened the front door he walked closely behind her out over the wet grass and into the darkening twilight of the rain-fragrant greenery.

  “See here!”

  The consciously mischievous note of her smile was enhanced by her deeper unconscious charm as she pointed to a rather small irregular protuberance on the Chestnut Tree at a height of about seven feet from the ground.

  “You used a transmitter and I did too. So I knew you had gone out and that you had not returned, at least not through the front door. It registers when the door is opened and closed and sends the signal to a mobile telephone device placed within a radius of one hundred metres. But it does not function any longer, the battery only lasts about two weeks or less. I should have placed a similar transmitter opposite your back door, and I would have removed this two weeks ago if your house had not given me such sinister associations.”

  She was – seeing her past actions objectively – now regretting her lack of timely thoroughness – and he felt the dark cold shadow of the coming night – of a suddenly expanding doubt – blight his hopes of having been able to change her course for good.

  “The Sky is clearing and it’s getting cold. Let us go back. If you had done that and seen that I had indeed come home by the back door, would you then still have broken into my house?”

  She settled as before in the sofa and he dared not intimidate her by any deliberate intimacy and sat down again – in defiance of the instinctive pull of his being in this world – in the chair.

  “I don’t think so; in fact, it’s rather unlikely that I would, but I might have waited a couple of days, or even long enough to have had to renew the batteries.”

  “So our meeting would have been delayed?”

  “Or it would never have taken place, for you could not surprise me if you were not at home.”

  “No, but I am at home most of the time during the summer months.”

  “Except when you go out looking for birds and otters.”

  “But that’s when it’s light or at least twilight and I imagine that you would prefer the dark?”

  “I do, but not always.”

  While he did not necessarily believe in predestination he wanted right now to be able to prove that it had to be true so that she would accept the notion that their meeting had been predestined – and hence that it would be obvious that their future life together likewise would have to be predestined
– but she was intent on maintaining that their meeting had been a pure accident or a strange coincidence – wherefore she would be free to chose whatever option she wanted. He was not going to lead her down a one way road of no choice – of inevitability – for she did not want to commit herself yet to such an extent.